ok, i'm desperate and i need advice. i simply cannot keep my paladin tank alive; we've spent two full nights now wiping on a boss we 1-shot fairly easily last week. and most of the time, it's because the healer assigned to the tanks loses him.

we've been raiding together for quite awhile, and i've found him to be a very good tank. but i just don't know anything about paladins, so i'm turning to the experts for help. if i'm sucking at healing him, tell me. but i swear it feels like i'm healing a mage; full health and then dead within seconds. the times i can keep him alive, it's due to a lot of healing surge spam which leaves me dry quickly.

Ummm...1) Your tank doesn't uses Sacred Shield at all? It should have a fairly high (~90%) uptime on Horridon, with no off-tanking. SS would reduce his/her damage intake by ~25%.2) Why is his/her uptime on Shield of the Righteous (~50% damage reduction) so low? ~18% on most wipes? /For comparison I'm having ~45% uptime normally, but even a mastery build shouldn't fall below 30%./

There might be other things too, like he/she was once stuned by Stonegazers while tanking Horridon, but this is a really poor performance here.

That one is yours. 5+ seconds without a heal other then vamp embrace after a 400k hit won't work. Although it's questionable if that 400k hit was necessairy. I assume you bloodlust on the war god. It should be tanked with cooldowns, it's not up that long.However:http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/p5jd ... 890&e=9900That's the 10 second window before the tank died. Neither healed seemed to have done anything at all in that period. The priest has one penance tick and the shaman cast a riptide (might even have been ticks). 10s with wargod and horridon hitting tanks without casting a heal is very, very awkward. You should have each healer on a tank, stack up the raid behind the war god (as that's where melees are anyway) and let the shaman heal the raid dmg with healing rain. There is a good amount of raid dmg, but it comes over time. Healing rain should be able to heal people up until the next aoe. And healers need to focus on tanks.

Again, if you were assigned to the paladin, there could have been a heal from you. but then it was only two second and he took 350k, 350k, 350k. Some absorbs, but still, that's obviously not healable. Looking at the buffs/debuffs for the paladin tank:0 hand of protection0 pain suppression

Especially 0 hand of protection is worrisome. I checked all of your wipes and there was 1 hand of prot on him total. This is the tank debuff horridon does:Triple PunctureMelee RangeInstantInflicts 462500 to 537500 Physical damage and increases the damage taken from Triple Puncture by 10% for 1 min. This effect stacks.

This can be wiped out by hand of prot. What I would suggest doing is:Last gate:Tank A on adds, tank B on horridon. Once the adds are dealt with, tank A grabs horridon and tank B will pick up the war god. As soon as the war god spawns, hand of protection on the current horridon tank. He should macro /cancelaura hand of protection into for example crusader strike. As he has to cast the HoP himself, it's pretty simple for him to just hammer the cancelaura macro so it's gone instantly.Heroism and kill the war god. The horridon tank should not have more then 3-4 stacks at most, probably 2-3. As soon as the tank that had the wargod loses his stacks (and as he has not been on horridon for a while, that should be pretty soon or ideally the stacks are already gone by the time wargod dies), taunt horridon.

A minute later the off-tank should lose his stacks and taunt again, by now it should be dead. If you make the paladin spec into clemency, you could even reset it on the other tank as well during that 1 minute.

In general:Less raid healing, more focus on tanks. The raid dmg comes in bursts but then nothing happens for a while. There's no need to go nuts on raid healing, make sure tanks survive.Better cooldown using. Hand of protection is super powerful. Use it. Make sure the tanks use their own cooldowns in the last phase when wargod + horridon are up and then when horridon is enraged. If those run out, make sure they get external cooldowns.

HoP is only used if they want one tank to solo Horridon. Other than that, it is near-useless. Even after it's enrage Horridon doesn't hits enough hard to reset stacks that early. As long as they don't get 10+ stacks it is easily mitigate-able.Obviously it can be used, but it would cause more complication, than necessary, and the benefit would be near zero. So I wouldn't call it oh so powerful on Horridon.

Not true, Shahai. Being able to wipe clean a debuff that does significantly more spike dmg is powerful. Mitigating and reducing damage taken is always a priority and that's what makes Bubble and Hand of Protection insanely good for this. I don't care if you're solo tanking or dual tanking, things happen. If a tank is dying, this is something that the tank can do to help mitigate damage taken. Just doing a quick cancelaura macro that takes <.5 seconds to click is not adding more complication to anything, it just requires a little more thinking.

However, yes, there is a lot of things that the tank can do to mitigate dmg. Such as the simple sacred shield and pushing SotR right before Triple Puncture.

And my point was that while the tank(s) so drastically underpreform, saying that the lack of use of HoP is really worrying, kind of... not the highest problem. Obviously, if their tanks fail at such a basic mechanic, like pressing SotR before TP... then every little helps! But normally? No, tanking Horridon doesn't needs the use of HoP or buble, it would be a really unbalanced requirement too.

No fight requires the use of Bubble, HoP (both cancel horridon's debuff, Drumumumummu's debuff, slime debuff on Ji'kun, the debuff on Iron Quo, massive smash on Dark Animus), leap for a warrior (looking at you Animus Ring). They're just tools in the bag that are there to be used and if use properly (bubble taunting for instance), makes it overpowered, in a way. I don't think kai was necessarily saying HoP not being used is the sole reason, but it is a bit eyebrow raising to see not one used when it's there in the tool bag.

That one is yours. 5+ seconds without a heal other then vamp embrace after a 400k hit won't work. Although it's questionable if that 400k hit was necessairy. I assume you bloodlust on the war god. It should be tanked with cooldowns, it's not up that long.

However:http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/p5jd ... 890&e=9900That's the 10 second window before the tank died. Neither healed seemed to have done anything at all in that period. The priest has one penance tick and the shaman cast a riptide (might even have been ticks). 10s with wargod and horridon hitting tanks without casting a heal is very, very awkward. You should have each healer on a tank, stack up the raid behind the war god (as that's where melees are anyway) and let the shaman heal the raid dmg with healing rain. There is a good amount of raid dmg, but it comes over time. Healing rain should be able to heal people up until the next aoe. And healers need to focus on tanks.

seshel is not a tank, lol. we were moving into position for war-god, the DK was slow picking him up, and the dps monk took the first hit. the raid was pretty well topped off and we were moving from the 4th door, which is why you see little healing and instants during that time. i'm blaming the DK for that one.

normally, i do drop HR/HST for the raid and heal the war-god tank. that part is rarely a problem.

Again, if you were assigned to the paladin, there could have been a heal from you. but then it was only two second and he took 350k, 350k, 350k. Some absorbs, but still, that's obviously not healable. Looking at the buffs/debuffs for the paladin tank:0 hand of protection0 pain suppression

we swapped assignments back and forth that night, but if you see flash heals on him then he wasn't my assignment at that time. you can see i still left earth shield on and must have done some healing to proc earthliving; meanwhile the priest had renew ticking and was spamming flash heal and still couldn't keep him up. that exactly the sort of thing that kept happening. it's possible PS was on cooldown from an earlier near-death experience.

Kai wrote:Especially 0 hand of protection is worrisome. I checked all of your wipes and there was 1 hand of prot on him total. This is the tank debuff horridon does:Triple PunctureMelee RangeInstantInflicts 462500 to 537500 Physical damage and increases the damage taken from Triple Puncture by 10% for 1 min. This effect stacks.

This can be wiped out by hand of prot. What I would suggest doing is:Last gate:Tank A on adds, tank B on horridon. Once the adds are dealt with, tank A grabs horridon and tank B will pick up the war god. As soon as the war god spawns, hand of protection on the current horridon tank. He should macro /cancelaura hand of protection into for example crusader strike. As he has to cast the HoP himself, it's pretty simple for him to just hammer the cancelaura macro so it's gone instantly.Heroism and kill the war god. The horridon tank should not have more then 3-4 stacks at most, probably 2-3. As soon as the tank that had the wargod loses his stacks (and as he has not been on horridon for a while, that should be pretty soon or ideally the stacks are already gone by the time wargod dies), taunt horridon.

A minute later the off-tank should lose his stacks and taunt again, by now it should be dead. If you make the paladin spec into clemency, you could even reset it on the other tank as well during that 1 minute.

on the last gate, we do something close to that. paladin has adds, DK has boss. when adds die, paladin grabs boss and puts HoP on the DK to drop his stacks (the stacks take long enough that they won't fall off by the time war-god dies). when war-god dies, the DK is supposed to taunt horridon and the paladin uses DS on himself to drop stacks. any time we've ever gotten to that point with both tanks alive, it's a kill. we just need to get there; when war-god is up, we're much more likely to lose the paladin tanking horridon with 3 stacks, than the DK on war-god.

Shahei wrote:Even after it's enrage Horridon doesn't hits enough hard to reset stacks that early. As long as they don't get 10+ stacks it is easily mitigate-able.

10 stacks? wow, we're not able to get that high. normally, the tank is 7 or so stacks at each door, which is manageable, so we don't need the bubble for most of the fight. however, the HoP is extremely useful at the last phase for enrage tanking. he's meleeing the paladin for 400k+ per swing at that point, how can he mitigate that better?

pushing SotR right before Triple Puncture.

how are you timing this? i did mention this and he says it's tricky because the DBM timers are off.

There might be other things too, like he/she was once stuned by Stonegazers while tanking Horridon

this is a separate issue we're having with the DK struggling to pick up adds consistently.

how are you timing this? i did mention this and he says it's tricky because the DBM timers are off.

From my experiences TP come directly after swipe. Whether it's a charge + swipe or just the normal double swipe it will be followed by a TP. Easy to plan SotR for. I believe he also does one right off the bat and maybe after ramming doors?

And yeah your tank would benefit quite a bit by improving his buff/debuff uptimes as has already been mentioned.

Edit: Also if the tanks' add management is a problem (at least one of the paladin's deaths came from tanking both several adds and Horridon) try having your paly cancel aura Righteous Fury while tanking Horridon or have your add tank do a quick taunt on Horridon and the Horridon tank quickly taunting back to pick up some free vengeance (half of the taunt target's current target's vengeance is given instantly). Or both.

how are you timing this? i did mention this and he says it's tricky because the DBM timers are off.

Can't speak for DBM, but the BigWigs timer is dead on. It may seem like they're off because if he Charges, Double Swipes, or Dire Calls first, the Triple Puncture is delayed. If it's delayed by Charge or Double Swipe, ShoR about halfway through the Double Swipe channel (not the pre-cast) and it will generally cover both the Swipe Damage (for extra Vengeance) and the Triple Puncture. If it's Dire Call (heroic only), ShoR during the cast as the damage from Dire Call and Triple Puncture will go off nearly simultaneously.

If he's struggling with timing, probably best if he doesn't stand in Double Swipe for the Vengeance, but if he does that timing will work. Keep in mind, too, that the Double Swipe from the Charge actually hits for less and will, in general, lower Vengeance levels, so don't bother.

i just compared logs and noticed a large discrepancy in weakened blows uptime...

Yeah, because you have to fight with the ele-shamy and the other tank in your raid, so that you will have 100% uptime on WB. *facepalm* Check the logs better please. I'm still struggling with using HoR too often, wich is a minor DPS-loss.

EDIT: Further checking the logs... I have zero idea what you meant with this. o_O But whatever...

And yeah, I took once a 10th stack, it took like half of my HP down. I was sooo scared. (And this with my screwed up gear: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/t ... i/advanced ) Btw, it was only because someone had the funny idea to LoH me, so I couldn't drop the stacks like normally.

Casted SS once. 5.4% uptime. // 90%+ would be expectable.Used SotR 34 times, with 17,9% uptime. // ~30% would be acceptable.Used Holy Avenger 2 times, while he could have used it 4 times.

So the answer for your question? You can't keep he up, because he is playing badly. You can dislike me for saying this, but it is the truth. He might have been a extremely good tank before, but he has a lot to learn about the new AM. With fixing her playstyle, her damage intake could drop by at least 20%, but around 30%-ish is even more likely. Even SS itself can reduce her damage intake by 20-25%.Obviously you might dance around the issue, but most bosses in ToT hit harder than Horridon. So... good luck with that on the long run.

Shahei wrote:And yeah, I took once a 10th stack, it took like half of my HP down. I was sooo scared. (And this with my screwed up gear: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/t ... i/advanced ) Btw, it was only because someone had the funny idea to LoH me, so I couldn't drop the stacks like normally.

10 stacks isn't even all that dangerous with decent ShoR timing. I think at one point during Heroic 25 man progress I let myself get to 15 stack because I just didn't notice the damage.

Casted SS once. 5.4% uptime. // 90%+ would be expectable.Used SotR 34 times, with 17,9% uptime. // ~30% would be acceptable.Used Holy Avenger 2 times, while he could have used it 4 times.

So the answer for your question? You can't keep he up, because he is playing badly. You can dislike me for saying this, but it is the truth. He might have been a extremely good tank before, but he has a lot to learn about the new AM. With fixing her playstyle, her damage intake could drop by at least 20%, but around 30%-ish is even more likely. Even SS itself can reduce her damage intake by 20-25%.Obviously you might dance around the issue, but most bosses in ToT hit harder than Horridon. So... good luck with that on the long run.

Pretty much. 18% ShoR uptime is abysmal. 5.4% SS is actually mindbogglingly low. Holy Avenger, well, sometimes you hold it back for a dangerous moment, but yeah, it's a concern. Send her to Basic Training, basically.

I don't mean to pile on, but I think the best thing you can do for your tank his send him here and to Sacred Duty. Especially with regards to learning to keep Sacred Shield up, I recommend Theck's WeakAura strings (available at Sacred Duty); they add a HUD of cooldowns, timers, and an obnoxious bouncing icon when you're dropping SS or weakened blows. Active mitigation is drastically more complicated than the tanking rotations of old.... just as fights are now tuned around the expectation that most raiders use a boss timer like DBM or Big Wigs, AM is designed around the idea that players will use tools to use it precisely.

besides the playstyle advice above, there are some obvious errors with his gear choices. for example he is not running the PvE meta (austere) and reforging for avoidance while socketing hit/expertise. i'm not entirely sure what the prefered gearing strategy for inexperienced tanks is at the moment, but picking either would probably yield better result than doing a bit of both control and avoidance.

Shahei wrote:Yeah, because you have to fight with the ele-shamy and the other tank in your raid, so that you will have 100% uptime on WB. *facepalm* Check the logs better please. I'm still struggling with using HoR too often, wich is a minor DPS-loss.

EDIT: Further checking the logs... I have zero idea what you meant with this. o_O But whatever...

yeah, i'm confused a bit by your response as well. what i was saying is weakened blows uptime (buffs cast) was much lower for our tank than for yours. we don't have an elemental shaman (facepalm?), so it's only the other tank that would override, and it's only the last couple minutes of the fight where they're on the same target. imo, WB should be considered mandatory at least on horridon, warlords and bears.

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Shahei wrote:So the answer for your question? You can't keep he up, because he is playing badly. You can dislike me for saying this, but it is the truth. He might have been a extremely good tank before, but he has a lot to learn about the new AM.

why would i dislike you? this is exactly the kind of feedback that i'm looking for. what i mean about being a good tank is being good at mechanics, picking up adds, etc. however, keeping him alive has been a bit tough this expansion. if we can help him with the AM part, we'll be in good shape going forward.